I walked into the empty office. I kicked up dust on the floor. Everything’s destroyed. Desks collapsed, broken computers-. I can’t even make out there faces. “Umm, Mr. Newell, we heard a huge noise coming from here, what’s going on?”

I turned my head back on our new employee Jeff. He was in his 20’s. Young guy. Guess no one taught him how things go down around here. Too bad. “My god, is that a corpse? Mr. Newell what’s going on”- He dropped dead to the floor. I slid my pistol back into my shorts. “He knew too much…” I muttered, trying to hold back the tears. I called to get Mitch, the custodian. He’s cleaned messes like these up before. I walked out of the room as Mitch cleaned it up. This happens every time. The first time, they were picked off one by one. So I got a new team. The second ones disappeared without a trace. The third team went mental after whatever they saw. The fourth, fifth and sixth limbs were scattered throughout Valve headquarters, which was almost impossible to cover up. This was team number seven. Seven attempts at creating Half Life 3. No one knew about all these deaths but Mitch. If it ever got out… Then I saw it. A flash drive was on the floor, unbroken, unhurt by whatever happened to this office, slowly I picked it up… I sat at my home office. I’d been sitting there for an hour, staring at the flash drive. I’d never looked at the other teams in progress games. I never had the idea to look at what they’d created. I put in the flash drive.

The screen booted up a main menu. A weird one to say the least. The screen was distorted, and all there was, was a “play” button. I clicked it. A black screen showed. “So you found the flash drive, Mr. Newell.” A grinning face popped up on the screen. It’s taken you this long? “Him…” The cold face started to laugh. “We’ve got all seven versions Mr. Newell. Thing is,” He winked, “THERE ALL DLC!” Andrew Wilson’s face disappeared from the screen “I should’ve known…” A flash of guilt came across my face. I’LL KILL HIM!” “Ah but you see Mr. Newell.” I felt the cold end of a gun on the back of my head. “Once the Valve fanboys Daddy Gaben is dead, and the chance at a new Half Life seems gone, EA will step in and save the day. We’ve been waiting until you were vulnerable…”

“How did you kill them?!” I started to tear up. “The seven teams?!” I heard footsteps. “I’m sorry Gabe…” Mitch walked into the room. “Mitch, how could you…?” “He’d have killed me and my family, I had no choice”- I heard a gunshot, and the thunk of Mitch’s dead body on my wooden floor. “You’ll never get away with this cashcow”-

Another gun shot.

Sixth months later, EA released Half Life 3: Battlefront, along with six of its DLC and a poorly made Portal 3 expansion pack. The game was rated the worst ever released, THE END.

To be honest I've never played Half Life... I own it because yknow (steam summer sale) but it's graphics made me dizzy. I'm gonna start playing half life 2 soon, but I'm gonna use a mod for better graphics.

'Not again,' Gabe muttered to himself as he checked the readings on his Interdimensional Portal Gun. It was the 3,124th dimension he had visited, and just like all the others, in this version of Earth, the entire dev team for Half-Life 3 was completely dead. He reminisced about his four year long mission. Around 2012, he had gotten fed up with the Half-Life 3 development team. Valve had a big break however, when one of it's engineers developed a real-life portal gun that could transport the user across parallel Earth dimensions.

Gabe had decided it would be easier to travel to an alternate Earth where Half-Life 3 was a smashing success, and steal that version. Yet somehow, after 3,124 attempts, not a single dimension had a working build of the game. In fact, in every single dimension he had visited, the entire dev team had been stabbed to death and the computers destroyed. Very often, the blood hadn't even dried. "Well guess I'll have to try another one," he thought as he stuffed his face with a Twinkie and hit the button on his Portal Gun...

(5 minutes earlier) 'Not again,' Gabe muttered to himself as he checked the readings on his Interdimensional Portal Gun. It was the 3,124th dimension he had visited, and just like all the others, in this version of Earth, not a single person was working on Ricochet 2. It was just about the same everywhere. People were always working on some strange little game called "Half-Life 3." He stared at a nearby screen to see what it was all about. It seemed like the developers were on the final build, and in fact the game was almost done. Not only that, but it seemed like the main sidekick character Alyx spent the entire game completely nude. Suddenly, the members of the dev team entered the room. "Hey boss," one of them exclaimed, "we thought you were dea---"

Gabe had pulled out a knife from its holster and was stabbing the members of the dev team in the throat. "I'm sorry, but this is the only way to get Ricochet 2!" he yelled. Before pouring gasoline on the office computers, he dropped by his own office and picked up a knife off the desk of dimension-3124 Gabe. "Another piece for my collection," he giggled. By killing off non-Ricochet 2 dimension developers, Gabe was sending vibrations through the harmonic multiverse strings. 'Enough murders, and someday I will land in a Ricochet 2 universe!' he thought as he stuffed his face with a Ho-Ho and hit the button on his Portal Gun...

"Please, Mr. Newell! The entire department's already split into several roaming gangs again! Please, please let us work on something else before we're forced to start eating one another!"

Gabe Newell sighed and popped another aspirin. "Fine. I'll tell them they're allowed to work on another set of hats for Team Fortress 2--" he raised a finger to silence the intern's grateful blubbering, "--on the condition that each developer only makes one hat per class!"

Gabe Newell sat at his desk, twiddling his thumbs, whilst staring directly at his closed office door. On the desk in front of him, was a newspaper, with the headline:

VIDEO GAME DEVELOPERS FOUND DEAD IN DC

Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve Software in Washington DC, had noticed something odd ever since he confirmed the infamous title *Half Life 2 : Episode 3." There would a team of maybe 30-40 people working, under the bingo wings of the elder leader, Gabe. They would all suddenly die after the first few character models are rendered.

Every. Single. Time.

It is now 2089, 82 years since Gaben announced HL3. The death toll is now 3,280 people. That's 40 staff for every year, dead. Killed, suddenly. Found dead at their desks. Fine the first day, feeling "meh" the second day, dead by the.. third day.

"..Mr.. Newell..?" Said a voice on Newell's intercom on the desk. He pushed the buzzer and the office door clicked and unlocked. A young lady wandered in.

"..Mr Newell, I-"

"-Call me Ted, Jessica, we're all friends here, no need to be on a last name basis, hah!" Ted Newell said. Ted is Gabe Newell's son. His only son, who carried on Gabe's work, after he died of a heart attack in 2050.

"..So.. Ted, what's the plan? I mean, we've got the security you asked for, i mean, i can see the door works very well, and uh, well, that's all you've asked for really, don't.. don't you wanna consider protection for our staff?" Jessica panicked.

Ted Newell slowly got up from his chair, walked around the desk and put his hands in front of him, placing them on Jessica's shoulders. He took a big sigh, and used one of his hands to scratch his scruffy beard. Ted looked EXACTLY like Gabe Newell does. The only difference was the voice, and the fact that he didn't wear a hat.

"Listen, Jessica." Ted sighed. "You're new here. So, I'm gonna be honest with you." Jessica looked confused and stepped back from Ted quickly. Ted looked down at his feet, and glared for a few seconds.

"Before I was born, my father, Gabe, he witnessed the death of his staff. Every. Single. Year. Because of one game, and you know the company policy is that we don't mention it, heck, not even I can mention it! But anyways, whoever works on the game, dies. Apart from me. 3,000 people have died since 2007, Jessica."

Jessica smirked and approached Ted with a warm handshake.

"Haha, good one, Ted, you sure are the joker, you-"

"THREE THOUSAND FUCKING PEOPLE JESSICA ALL BECAUSE OF HALF LIFE 3. WELL GUESS WHAT!? THERE WAS NO FUCKING HALF LIFE 3. MY FATHER MADE IT ALL UP. HE HAD A CONCEPT AND IT WAS SHIT. HE BURNED IT WITH THE REST OF HIS SHITTY LITTLE CONCEPTS SO PEOPLE LIKE ME WOULDN'T BE OVER HYPED AND DISAPPOINTED WHEN IT WOULD RELEASE!!" Ted screamed.

Jessica gasped and dropped dead to the floor. Ted gasped also, and muttered. He shut the office door behind him, picked his soda can up from the floor which he noticed was under the desk, threw it into the trash can, and dragged Jessica's body into a closet labelled "assistants 2030-NOW". Ted pinched the bridge of his nose and muttered again.

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